Farnham/Churchill [PDF]: “We found that for many people identity is faceted across areas of their lives, that some of these facets are incompatible, and that this incompatibility impacts levels of self-reported worry about sharing in social technologies, particularly in social networks. Family emerged as the most important facet of people’s lives, and younger, working men without children reported the highest levels of incompatibility across facets. Further research will be needed to explore the nature of these incompatibilities. People with higher levels of incompatibility were more likely to use email, and to a lesser extent Facebook, to support different areas of their lives, especially adult and media activities. – These results are consistent with the argument that identity and social context are tightly intertwined, and that tools that enable faceted identity and sharing across segmented areas of people’s lives will greatly improve user experiences of social media. Email, which enables more personal, private sharing had a much higher level on our measure of social intensity than did Facebook. Although users expressed appreciation for keeping in touch with their extended network in Facebook, they use email for their more private, bounded sharing. People with higher levels of faceted identity had higher levels of usage of social technologies overall, however they also expressed more worry about sharing, especially in social networks. Social networks in particular need better tools for intimate, private sharing – honoring the boundaries between different areas of people‟s faceted lives.”

Haskell: “There will be increasing awareness that Augmented Reality, and not pure Virtual Reality, will be the future for what we now call virtual worlds. … By year-end 2010, 50 of the Global 1000 will have dramatically expanded their presence in Second Life, with collaboration being a key enterprise target. … There is a 30% chance of Second Life being acquired by a larger company in 2010. IBM, Microsoft, Sony, Facebook, and Google are all candidates.”

Neva: “Augmented Reality will become the hugest thing, with everybody scrambling with zealous greed to create APIs and games and features and better phones. … Linden Lab will sell itself. Note that I say ‘sell itself,’ and not ‘IPO’. There is no IPO coming, not in this recession and post-VW boom climate. Instead, LL will become a ‘partner’ to something bigger. Perhaps IBM will buy the Enterprise function and keep Lindens on as a content-creation studio, and they will keep that brand or even call themselves Nebraska or something equally stupid but they will all be Lindens.”

Gwyn: “Interop will become a reality. Don’t expect miracles before the year’s end, though. Starting just after June 2010, when the interoperability communication protocol among grids becomes an Internet standard, LL will work together with at least IBM and Intel (and possibly some large OpenSim grid co-location services – which will exclude most of the OpenSim grids people usually talk about) to allow Gold Grid Providers full interoperability with Second Life Grid.”

MJ: “2010 will see the United States further formalise taxation arrangements in regard to virtual goods. I doubt the Australian Tax Office will make any substantive rulings in the coming twelve months. – 2010 is going to see the largest MMO launch since World of Warcraft: Star Wars The Old Republic. It won’t eclipse the incumbent but it will become the solid number 2 player in the short-term, with all bets off in the longer term. – This year saw social games like Farmville take off in a big way. There’ll be some significant fatigue from users with these platforms, but there’ll also be further innovation to make them more engaging and with easier integration of virtual goods without the spam-like accompaniments that plague people’s Twitter of Facebook timelines. Overall: continuation of exponential growth, albeit not at the same level it has been the past six months.”

Frisby: “Consolidation continues throughout the first half of 2010. – Platforms with relatively simple feature sets will continue to face increased competition from free products and their more technologically complex brethren. Many will survive on one or two large clients – but as a whole they will languish with a dearth of new clients. … Entertainment Worlds continue to quietly succeed year-after-year. – I’m not talking about MMORPG games here either. The consumer entertainment virtual worlds will continue to grow, or at least will not stagnate as fast as business worlds. There.com, IMVU, Second Life will all continue to see growth – although at a smaller percentage than they have previously (5-15%). – Blue Mars will languish for the first half of 2010, but may gain serious pace in late 2010 as usability problems are fixed and average user hardware specifications continue to improve.”

Let’s hope so :) It’s nice to see how people continue to keep their optimism about VWs and their uses! It’s a technology that is approaching maturity (at least on some platforms) but it’s still so much misunderstood… for 2010, I wish that this technology starts to become better and better understood as its uses become apparent…